Educating for Wisdom: A Social-Parasocial Approach

Imagine an education system designed from the ground up around fundamental human needs, from strong social bonds to cultural flourishing on a healthy planet. We are an inventive species, now with fantastically powerful tools, but limited wisdom to use them toward good. Solving this mismatch may be the key to our collective well-being. In this essay, I sketch an educational approach for building wisdom, with a special focus on learning through social interactions with other people, and one-way parasocial interactions with others via media (video instructors, social media influencers, fictional characters, etc.), as well as interactions with non-human agents (chatbots, AI-driven tutors, etc.).

Systems of education include three essential features: a curriculum defining what should be learned, pedagogies guiding how learning occurs, and a theme addressing — implicitly or explicitly — a wider goal or purpose. We live in a rapidly changing, high-stakes world of artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, robotic automation, extended reality, quantum computing, brain-computer interfaces, climate change, nuclear threat, political polarization, social conflict, and more. Education must help people develop healthy, constructive relationships to a world in flux.

In this light, wisdom should be the central goal of education in the 21st century, to help individuals, groups, and our species survive and thrive in challenging times. The curriculum ought to help people find the positive potential in changes, and be ready for anything — for example, by developing deep, flexible understanding of ourselves (e.g., building mindfulness, executive function, self-efficacy), our sociality (relationships, communities, institutions, cultures, etc.), and how the world works (e.g., first principles of the physical, living, social, and digital realms). Various pedagogies should support diverse needs, with social learning playing a central role — people learning from people.

Why center social learning? First, it’s a deeply human activity, evident across history and cultures — toddlers watching parents, apprentices working shoulder-to-shoulder with master craftspeople, and interns engaging in legitimate peripheral participation in a modern-day work setting. Second, it affords acquisition of skills, knowledge, and dispositions applied in relevant, “real world” contexts. Third, it supports social-emotional development through relations with others — both in-group and out-group, familiar and unfamiliar. Fourth, its core pedagogical power can be extended through parasocial interactions with others in print, audio, video, digital environments, and other media. In this way, individuals may form one-way parasocial relationships with real people or fictional characters, or with interactive non-human agents. Finally, the combined use of social and parasocial relations can be designed to emphasize essential human values such as empathy, compassion, collaboration, ethics, and even wisdom.

Wisdom has many definitions (see Resources below). As an educational goal, it should be defined to engage a diversity of learners, illuminate essential features, and guide wise action. The Oxford Dictionary suggests that wisdom is “the ability to use your knowledge and experience to make good decisions and judgments”. Given the urgency and gravitas of building wisdom in our current era, I focus on five aspects that may readily be operationalized to help learners, young and old:

• present – be aware of one’s current experience and context (in the physical, living, social, and digital realms),
• past – understand historical trajectories,
• future – orient towards the future,
• diversity – honor multiple perspectives, and
• action – do social good.

To illustrate this approach, consider what a project for wisdom might look like. A group of tweens, teens, and adults come together to improve a local park, abandoned lot, or other neighborhood space. They engage multiple stakeholders to help envision what they might create together. The process includes historical analysis of similar projects and previous expectations for this space. And, it emphasizes finding new synergies across diverse perspectives, much like a jigsaw curriculum might achieve in an academic context. With a solid sense of self, and experience engaging the world from various perspectives, participants practice adapting to change. They have repeated experiences addressing a problem from one perspective, pivoting to a new perspective, reflecting on differences and commonalities, and synthesizing new knowledge to inform their solutions.

How might social/parasocial learning benefit this sort of educational synergy project? Imagine a set of Learning Archetypes (characters or personas that represent the central qualities of specific domains of knowledge) brought to life in fictional stories, or through AI-based characters, and together being greater than the sum of their parts. Participants might consult an Artist Archetype to help facilitate conversations about the aesthetic appeal of the project, and making connections to local artists willing to advise them. Likewise, Learning Archetypes might take the role of Athletes to consider physical engagement, Naturalists to advise on environmental impact, Authors to support written reflection and reporting, and Teachers to facilitate learning among participants and interested others. As a result, individuals inhabit an archetypal role, pivot to another one, reflect on complementary perspectives, and synthesize new insights or design activities.

Imagine projects like this being part of a holistic curriculum, designed to guide learning and development, lifelong, and lifewide. Like developmentally-oriented early childhood education, it would include core domains such as physical, social-emotional, and cognitive growth. It would adapt to the needs of individuals at different stages of life and cultural contexts. The social/parasocial approach to curriculum and pedagogy would incorporate a diverse set of social roles to represent a holistic range of development. Like a board of advisors guiding a business executive, a team of domain-specialized life coaches, or the proverbial “village” of caring adults raising a child, the circle of Learning Archetypes would support a well-rounded approach to human development and learning.

Consider another neighborhood project, this time from the perspective of a young participant supported by a diverse circle of peers and elders. Ella feels encouraged by her team to identify personal strengths and how to use them in the project — in this case, using her artistic skills to design a mural about the urban ecosystem for a blank warehouse wall. Her sense of agency and confidence build as she researches other murals historically and around the country, and shares her findings with the team. This part of the project is a challenge. As a struggling reader, she is hesitant to consult written resources, and dreads having to write a description of her mural idea. However, with support of local mentors and online resources — including Author, Artist, and Naturalist Archetypes — she completes a set of sketches and descriptions of her mural idea, which help them get it funded by the city. She also uses this work for her service learning requirements at school.

Ella’s participation in the mural project encompasses the five core features of wise action mentioned above. First she visited the warehouse site and a local park to reflect on her experience of each, and considered how to evoke a sense of awe and gratitude for the living world using a three-story expanse of brick (present). Collaborating with teammates, she learned about the history of the warehouse, and competing plans for its future (past, future). She alternated looking at the challenge from an aesthetic perspective of various materials as seen by pedestrians walking; then, from a naturalist’s view of how urban plants thrive in a web of interdependencies (flow of water, sun, and nutrients, undisturbed by other activities); and an author’s task of communicating ideas to a diverse audience of peers and adults (diversity). She used these various perspectives to inform her creative process, craft a winning proposal, and help build an innovative mural, combining paint, sculpture, climbing areas, and a vertical garden growing from the brick wall (action). In her own small way, Ella made a wise contribution to her community, contributed to decreasing climate change and social polarization, and gained skills that will be useful in her future.

In this way, educating for wisdom should be a core activity in the 21st century. Along with incremental improvements to existing academic systems, we need to envision new educational paradigms aligned with the needs of individuals, groups, institutions, and communities in a world of exponential technological change. With this sort of human-centered approach to supporting development and learning, we just might succeed in building a world that works for everyone.

 

 

For a detailed exploration of these topics, please contact the author by Monday, May 29th to receive a free “beta” version of this upcoming book, tentatively titled: How to Survive the 21st Century: Wisdom for a Rapidly Changing World. drjimgraywisdom2024[at]gmail.com.

 

 

Resources:

• Legitimate peripheral participation (Wikipedia). 
• Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, 1991. Jean Lave & Etienne  Wenger. 
• The Jigsaw Classroom (website).
• Designing for Parasocial Relationships and Learning: Linear Video, Interactive Media, and Artificial Intelligence. James H. Gray, Emily Reardon, and Jennifer A. Kotler
• SEVEN GRANDFATHER TEACHINGS (website)
• What is “Indigenous Knowledge” And Why Does It Matter? Integrating Ancestral Wisdom and Approaches into Federal Decision-Making, (blog post). The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). 
• Conceptualizations of Wisdom in the Native American Community, 2012. Lamar Smith, (PhD Dissertation) Antioch University, Santa Barbara, CA.
• The Cambridge Dictionary: “wisdom” definition.
• Oxford English Dictionary: “wisdom” definition.
• Wikipedia: “wisdom” entry. 

Dr. James H. Gray (Jim) has a background in human development, learning science, early childhood education, school reform, playful learning, and technology design. He has held leadership roles at several innovative educational organizations, including Sesame Workshop, the MIT Media Lab, and LeapFrog, Inc. He has also conducted education-related research at Harvard University’s Project Zero and the NSF-funded Center for Innovative Learning Technology. He is father of two teen girls, husband to an education media leader, and frequent walker of Yogi, the family’s Black Lab. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jgray344/